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BLACKOUT_2003

                                            August 16, 2003

Williamsburg was impressive enough to
make me look for excuses to go back           EAST_OF_THE_EAST
there, and a few days later I figured
I'd go and buy a new USB mouse for my         I was in the area to see
brother's iMac over at that computer          family out on Long Island,
supply place next to the Internet             but Dangerbaby was in the
Garage.                                       city on business, (The New
                                              York Gift Show, at Moscone
So there I was sipping a soy latte in         center).  As our story
the "Form Fit Custom Girdle Factory"          begins here, I was on my way
at 4:11pm when the lights went out.           from her hotel on the West
                                              Side, heading back out to
I was faced with a choice:                    the 'burbs, with
in or out?                                    Williamsburg a detour.

Blunder to the eastern outskirts
of the city using unfamiliar buses, or
head back in, to see if I could bum
another night in the Dangerbabe's
hotel room?

This didn't seem like much of a
choice to me... if things were
going to get crazy, I'd rather be
in Manhattan.  Even sleeping in
Central Park on a hot summer
night might be fun if you didn't           Escape Into New York
have to worry about the cops
hassling you.

I rode the bus up to Queens Plaza, and I
had another choice: take a bus across or
walk.  The bus was sensible, I thought,
but I hadn't walked across the 59th Street
bridge in a long time, so I opted to walk
it...

I was not the only one.

This was a pedestrian critical mass.

So many people were walking that they took
over all the lanes, there was no way that a
bus could have gotten through...

Halfway across, we were hit by the human
wave front coming the other way from
Manhattan, and it got hard to even walk it
in the Westward direction.

I was up on the deckplate on the divder
between lanes, and even up there I had
problems dodging around people with the same
idea coming the other way... I was doing a
lot of climbing around the bridge structure,
slipping through smaller spaces other people
were ignoring.

Once I made it to the other side in
Manhattan, I found that walking
cross-town and down town wasn't easy
either, but wasn't as big a problem.

The hotel (the New Yorker) had hordes of
people sitting around on the floor of the
lobby. Weirdly enough, this place had very
little in the way of emergency lighting;        Many people expressed
I needed my flashlight to find my way           amazement at my
around in the basement to the bathroom          flashlight, from which we
and the payphones.                              can infer that there are
                                                few engineering nerds in
The house phones were dead, but the             the New York area.
payphones were working, and so was
the Dangerbabe's cellphone (not
everyone's were).
                                            Everywhere, shops and restaurants
So I got together with her on the           were running on candles, many of
terrace of her friends hotel down           them hauled their merchandise out
on 16th Street, and we hung around          on to the street to sell it quickly
and watched the stars come out              before it went bad.
over Manhattan.

And that night it was a slog back
through the darkened streets, and
up 19 flights of stairs to crash
in a room without running water....


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